Last month, the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project released A Portrait of Jewish Americans, the first major study of the American Jewish population in more than a decade. For the Pew researchers, the big news was an increase in the portion of the population that describes itself as “atheist, agnostic, or having no particular religion”—specifically in the younger generations. They highlighted this finding in the report and press briefings and stressed its similarity to a parallel development in the broader American society. “Americans as a whole—not just Jews—increasingly eschew any religious affiliation,” the authors explained.

The message resonated throughout the national media. “The trend toward secularism is also happening in the American population in general,” Laurie Goodstein wrote in the New York Times, alongside Pew’s table illustrating the generational decline in religious identification among Jews, “with increasing proportions of each generation claiming no religious affiliation.” A few weeks later, the Times published a “Room for Debate” exchange among Jewish and Christian contributors under the headline, “If Jews skip synagogue and Christians skip Church.”

But by filtering the survey’s findings through the prism of general American religious trends, Pew missed a dramatic new development particular to the American Jewish community, one that both explains the increase in the religiously unaffiliated population and suggests a profound challenge for Jewish institutions: the rise of the first generation of American Jews among whom half are adult children of intermarried parents.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/holy-post/first-generation-jews-emerge-out-of-american-landscape-2/feed0stdMiami Beach Community Celebrates First Night Of Passover With SederFirst-generation Jews emerge out of American landscapehttp://news.nationalpost.com/holy-post/first-generation-jews-emerge-out-of-american-landscape
http://news.nationalpost.com/holy-post/first-generation-jews-emerge-out-of-american-landscape#commentsTue, 12 Nov 2013 15:32:09 +0000http://life.nationalpost.com/?p=126383

Last month, the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project released A Portrait of Jewish Americans, the first major study of the American Jewish population in more than a decade. For the Pew researchers, the big news was an increase in the portion of the population that describes itself as “atheist, agnostic, or having no particular religion”—specifically in the younger generations. They highlighted this finding in the report and press briefings and stressed its similarity to a parallel development in the broader American society. “Americans as a whole—not just Jews—increasingly eschew any religious affiliation,” the authors explained.

The message resonated throughout the national media. “The trend toward secularism is also happening in the American population in general,” Laurie Goodstein wrote in the New York Times, alongside Pew’s table illustrating the generational decline in religious identification among Jews, “with increasing proportions of each generation claiming no religious affiliation.” A few weeks later, the Times published a “Room for Debate” exchange among Jewish and Christian contributors under the headline, “If Jews skip synagogue and Christians skip Church.”

But by filtering the survey’s findings through the prism of general American religious trends, Pew missed a dramatic new development particular to the American Jewish community, one that both explains the increase in the religiously unaffiliated population and suggests a profound challenge for Jewish institutions: the rise of the first generation of American Jews among whom half are adult children of intermarried parents.

As some countries grapple with the issue of same-sex marriage, a new global survey finds many societies are divided over whether homosexuality should be accepted or punitively punished. “There is far less acceptance of homosexuality in countries where religion is central to people’s lives,” according to the Pew Research Center’s survey of 39 key nations. Wealth is also a factor in homosexual tolerance – rich countries are generally accepting, while in many poorer countries few believe it should be tolerated.

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]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/graphic-global-gay-acceptance/feed7galleryNA0622_PrideMonth_C_RJweb620NA0622_PrideMonth_C_RJweb940aWomen become top earners in record 40% of U.S. householdshttp://news.nationalpost.com/life/as-moms-become-main-breadwinners-in-u-s-families-americans-fret-over-child-care-report
http://news.nationalpost.com/life/as-moms-become-main-breadwinners-in-u-s-families-americans-fret-over-child-care-report#commentsWed, 29 May 2013 16:15:27 +0000http://life.nationalpost.com/?p=109363

America’s working mothers are now the primary breadwinners in a record 40% of households with children — a milestone in the changing face of modern families, up from just 11% in 1960.

The findings by the Pew Research Center, released Wednesday, highlight the growing influence of “breadwinner moms” who keep their families afloat financially. While most are headed by single mothers, a growing number are families with married mothers who bring in more income than their husbands.

Demographers say the change is all but irreversible and is likely to bring added attention to child-care policies as well as government safety nets for vulnerable families. Still, the general public is not at all sure that having more working mothers is a good thing.

While roughly 79% of Americans reject the notion that women should return to their traditional roles, only 21% of those polled said the trend of more mothers of young children working outside the home is a good thing for society, according to the Pew survey.

Roughly three out of four adults said the increasing number of women working for pay has made it harder for parents to raise children.

“This change is just another milestone in the dramatic transformation we have seen in family structure and family dynamics over the past 50 years or so,” said Kim Parker, associate director with the Pew Social & Demographic Trends Project. “Women’s roles have changed, marriage rates have declined — the family looks a lot different than it used to.

The rise of breadwinner moms highlights the fact that, not only are more mothers balancing work and family these days, but the economic contributions mothers are making to their households have grown immensely.”

The trend is being driven mostly by long-term demographic changes, including higher rates of education and labour force participation dating back to the 1960s women’s movement. Today, more women than men hold bachelor’s degrees, and they make up nearly half — 47% — of the American workforce.

But recent changes in the economy, too, have played a part. Big job losses in manufacturing and construction, fields that used to provide high pay to a mostly male workforce, have lifted the relative earnings of married women, even among those in mid-level positions such as teachers, nurses or administrators. The jump in working women has been especially prominent among those who are mothers — from 37% in 1968 to 65% in 2011 — reflecting in part increases for those who went looking for jobs to lift sagging family income after the recent recession.

At the same time, marriage rates have fallen to record lows. Forty percent of births now occur out of wedlock, leading to a rise in single-mother households. Many of these mothers are low-income with low education, and more likely to be black or Hispanic.

In all, 13.7 million U.S. households with children under age 18 now include mothers who are the main breadwinners. Of those, 5.1 million, or 37%, are married, while 8.6 million, or 63%, are single. The income gap between the families is large — $80,000 in median family income for married couples vs. $23,000 for single mothers.

Both groups of breadwinner moms — married and unmarried — have grown sharply.

Among all U.S. households with children, the share of married breadwinner moms has jumped from 4% in 1960 to 15% in 2011. For single mothers, the share has increased from 7% to 25%.

Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University, said that to his surprise public attitudes toward working mothers have changed very little over the years. He predicts the growing numbers will lead to a growing constituency among women in favour of family-friendly work policies such as paid family leave, as well as safety net policies such as food stamps or child care support for single mothers.

“Many of our workplaces and schools still follow a male-breadwinner model, assuming that the wives are at home to take care of child care needs,” he said. “Until we realize that the breadwinner-homemaker marriage will never again be the norm, we won’t provide working parents with the support they need.”

Other findings:

• There is a gender gap on attitudes. About 45% of women say children are better off if their mother is at home, and 38% say children are just as well off if the mother works. Among men, 57% say children are better off if their mother is at home, while 29% say they are just as well off if she works.

• The share of married couples in which the wife is more educated than the husband is rising, from 7% in 1960 to 23% in 2011. Still, the vast majority of couples include spouses with similar educational backgrounds, at 61%.

• The number of working wives who make more than their husbands has been increasing more rapidly in recent years. Among recently married couples, including those without children, the share of “breadwinner wives” is roughly 30%, compared with 24% of all married couples.

• The Pew study is based on an analysis of census data as of 2011, the latest available, as well as interviews with 1,003 adults by cellphone or landline from April 25 to 28. The Pew poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

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]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/life/as-moms-become-main-breadwinners-in-u-s-families-americans-fret-over-child-care-report/feed0stdWorking motherWomen-Breadwinners-Chris Selley: A new narrative on American gun violencehttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-a-new-narrative-on-american-gun-violence
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-a-new-narrative-on-american-gun-violence#commentsFri, 10 May 2013 04:01:23 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=116172

Here’s a narrative-buster: Between 1993 and the turn of the century, gun violence in the United States plummeted to levels last seen in the early 1960s. And it has held more or less steady since, according to a Pew Research Center report released this week. The overall rate of firearm deaths in 2010 was down 32% from 1993; homicides were down 49%. Another report released this week, from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), offers similar numbers. It also notes that school-associated homicides of children aged 5-18 are on a noticeable downward trend — though 2012 will, sadly, not perpetuate it.

If this had been a period of ever-tightening restrictions on gun ownership in the United States, gun control advocates would be claiming victory — just as they did here in Canada, as we experienced a similar trend, with regards to the long-gun registry. But all this good news stateside unfolded as the number of guns in the country grew by roughly 50%. “Per capita, the civilian gun stock has roughly doubled since 1968, from one gun per every two persons to one gun per person,” the BJS report notes.

This belies the simplistic fewer-guns-equals-less-crime narrative. But it is not difficult to explain: Crime (and gun crime) went up in the 1960s and 1970s, when Baby Boomers were in their “high-crime ages,” as the Pew report puts it. It declined in the 1980s as the Boomers entered their Carlsberg years. It spiked later in the 1980s during the crack epidemic, and declined in the 1990s as the economy grew. Social factors affect crime rates more than any policy or law.

That’s not an argument against gun control. But it bolsters an argument to shift the focus from gun control per se to public safety.

Americans are largely ignorant of their improving gun-crime statistics. In a March survey, Pew found that that just 12% correctly believed there are fewer gun crimes today than there were 20 years ago; 26% thought the number was the same, and 56% thought it was higher. Americans also pay disproportionate attention — as do we all, and understandably so — to mass shootings, which (defined as three or more victims) accounted for less than 1% of all murders between 1980 and 2008, according to the BJS report.

In 2012, Pew reports, the only news story that more Americans followed more closely than the Sandy Hook massacre was the presidential election. The Aurora, Colo, theatre shooting ranked fifth. Yet the 38 combined victims of these atrocities represent just 0.3% of firearm homicides in 2010, and 0.1% of total firearm deaths. Even the 21 children killed represent only 12% of the 2010 total for under-12 firearm deaths, and 17% of under-12 firearm homicides.

I argued recently that since the post-massacre model of gun control advocacy demonstrably doesn’t work in the United States, it might be time for proponents to focus on the innocent people who die in ones and twos — i.e., on 99% of the total victims — with the same intensity we focused on the victims at Sandy Hook. Some of the saddest stories out there are accidents: Just recently a five-year-old Kentucky boy killed his two-year-old sister with a rifle designed for kids. That might be an argument for gun control. But it’s certainly an argument for people to control their guns, not least around children.

YURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty ImagesA march for gun control in Washington one month after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Or consider the case of Phil Danner, an Indiana man inexplicably shot to death in 2010 by his 15-year-old stepson Colt Lundy and, even more inexplicably, by a 12-year-old accomplice, Paul Henry Gingerich. (They both shot twice.) There was no motive to speak of; Gingerich doesn’t seem to have been in any trouble before at all. They had a plan to steal Danner’s car and run away to Arizona, but they could easily have done that without killing him. A man is dead for no reason, and two children, who were tried as adults and pleaded guilty, are serving 30-year sentences for an utterly senseless crime.

Last week, Channel 4 in the UK broadcast Zara Hayes’ documentary, Twelve-Year-Old Lifer, which promised “an extraordinary insight into a murder that gripped and baffled America.” It didn’t deliver, unfortunately. But it did put faces to the names: Danner’s biological children, struggling to comprehend this ultimate betrayal by a family member; his sisters, who agonize over the justice of these incredibly harsh sentences; Gingerich’s father and mother, who agreed to police interviewing their son without a lawyer when he claimed to be a bystander, then watched in horror as he admitted to closing his eyes and pulling the trigger.

In the documentary, Paul Gingerich Sr. tells Hayes that he absolutely does not want his son portrayed as a victim. He just wants him to serve his time as the youth he was and be out with a chance of a normal life at 21. (They are gambling on exactly that with an appeal that will be heard in June. If, on the other hand, Paul Jr. is sent back to adult court and convicted, he faces 65 years.) I don’t think I could make that argument, even for strategic purposes, if it were my son — certainly not if he really was the good kid everyone says he was.

Hayes asks Lundy whether the guns he and Gingerich used were locked up. He looks at her like she has two heads

The public has to be protected from dangerous people no matter what their age. But beyond that, when it comes to youth justice, I’ll admit to being a bleeding heart. Correctional facilities are just criminal factories. Nothing I’ve read suggests that harsh sentences have much useful deterrent effect on the adolescent or pre-adolescent mind. I can remember doing bad things as a kid that I couldn’t possibly explain to myself, never mind anyone else, a second later — nothing horrible, but then, no older boy ever tried to enlist me to help kill his stepfather.

And none of my friends’ houses had guns lying around. At one point in the documentary, Hayes asks Lundy whether the guns he and Gingerich used were locked up. He looks at her like she has two heads, and she doesn’t pursue the matter. But it’s really the only thing that makes sense about this story: Without firearms immediately available to him, Colt Lundy almost certainly couldn’t have killed his stepfather. Without that rifle available to him, that five-year-old in Kentucky couldn’t have killed his sister.

There are thousands of stories like these — accidents, flashes of rage, suicides (which now account for 60% of firearm deaths in the U.S.) — that might have been prevented with a $150 pistol safe or a locked cabinet. It’s time to put faces to those stories. There’s good news here, even after President Obama’s gun control measures came to nothing: Not only are gun deaths at a 50-year low point. They could be lower without taking anyone’s guns away.

WASHINGTON — As the U.S. middle class faces its “worst decade in modern history,” a new report says an impending “fiscal cliff” is worse than previously thought and could plunge the country into recession.

Massive U.S. government spending cuts and tax hikes due next year will cause dire economic damage if Washington fails to come up with a solution, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned on Wednesday.

Without action by Congress to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” Americans should expect a “significant recession” and the loss of some two million jobs, CBO director Doug Elmendorf said in his gloomiest assessment yet.

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The forecast comes as a Pew Research Center study says 85% of middle-class Americans feel it is more difficult now than a decade ago to maintain their standard of living. The report describes them as losing faith in the future.

The study says the U.S. middle class is facing its “worst decade in modern history,” with its share of the nation’s income falling for the first time since the Second World War.

Its share of the national income has been surpassed by affluent earners as median wages stagnate and wealth concentrates at the top in a relatively weak economy.

The new study reviewed 2010 data from the Census Bureau and Federal Reserve, defining “middle class” as the tier of adults whose household income falls between two-thirds and double the national median income, or US$39,418 to US$118,255 in 2010 for a family of three. By this definition, “middle class” makes up about 51% of U.S. adults, down from 61% in 1971.

In 1970, the share of U.S. income that went to the middle class was 62%. But by 2010, the middle class garnered 45% of the nation’s income.

Since 2000, the median income for America’s middle class has fallen from US$72,956 to US$69,487.

“The job market is changing, our living standards are falling in the middle, and middle-income parents are now afraid that their children will be worse off than they are,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor who specializes in income inequality.

“These are the disaffected middle class who work hard and play by the rules of society, but increasingly see their situation declining by forces beyond their control. No matter who is president, the climb back up for the middle class and the recovery will be slow and often painful.”

Today’s CBO report is another indictment of President Obama’s economic policies that have resulted in overspending, increasing debt and a growing financial burden on the next generation

The bleak assessment of middle class fortunes was delivered on the same day that the CBO said the economy was already being “held back” by the mere anticipation of the “fiscal cliff” and the uncertainty surrounding it, causing businesses to put off investment and hiring decisions.

“The sooner that uncertainty is eliminated, the better,” Mr. Elmendorf told a news conference. “The stakes are very high in the fiscal policy decisions we’re going to have to make very shortly.”

The report from the non-partisan agency should intensify pressure on Congress and the White House to resolve deep differences over cutting spending or extending tax cuts enacted during the George W. Bush administration.

But chances for a deal before the Nov. 6 election are slim. They could improve during the post-election lame-duck session of Congress, but that’s unpredictable as well.

Reactions to the warning did not signal any signs of movement by Democrats nor Republicans from entrenched partisan positions that form the basis of their campaigns.

“Today’s CBO report is another indictment of President Obama’s economic policies that have resulted in overspending, increasing debt and a growing financial burden on the next generation,” said Amanda Henneberg, a spokeswoman for Mitt Romney’s Republican presidential campaign.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney batted the blame back to Republicans in Congress.

“They’re willing to hold the middle class hostage unless we also give massive new tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires — tax cuts we can’t afford that would do nothing to strengthen the economy,” Mr. Carney said in a statement.

The “fiscal cliff” refers to the impact of around US$500-billion in expiring tax cuts and automatic spending reductions set for 2013 as a result of successive failures by Congress to agree on some orderly alternative method of reducing budget deficits.

The job market is changing, our living standards are falling in the middle, and middle-income parents are now afraid that their children will be worse off than they are

Failure to avoid it would spark U.S. fiscal tightening on a scale not seen since 1969 tax increases to pay for the Vietnam War — slamming the economy into recession as it did back then.

The CBO estimated that U.S. gross domestic product under this scenario would shrink 0.5% in 2013, with a crushing first-half contraction of 2.9% followed by a weak second-half rebound of 1.9% growth.

The main reasons for the gloomier outlook now are a weaker global economy, the growing uncertainty mentioned by Mr. Elmendorf about what Congress will do, and a determination that the cliff is somewhat steeper than previously thought.

Were Congress to extend all current tax policies and simply halt the automatic cuts, as many Republicans have proposed, the CBO said the economy would continue to grow, albeit weakly.

GDP growth under this more optimistic scenario would be modest in 2013 at 1.7%, with an 8% unemployment rate compared with 9.1% should the U.S. go over the “fiscal cliff.”

But it would cause the deficit to remain above US$1-trillion for a fifth consecutive year, versus a sharp fall to $641-billion under the “fiscal cliff” scenario. Mr. Elmendorf said keeping deficits this high would greatly increase the chances of a U.S. debt crisis that spikes interest rates higher, dramatically raising all borrowing costs.